Secondary education should be tailored according to a state’s demography and should factor in regional and local differences, two final-year students argued in a “hackathon” on access to secondary education in India.
Abhishek Banerjee and Ashmita Seal, students of The Heritage College, secured first place at the National Policy Hackathon 2025, jointly organised by the public policy clubs of the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta and the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT Kolkata).
The Calcutta students outperformed teams from Christ University, Bangalore, and Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad, who finished second and third, respectively.
The Heritage College students presented the topic — Enhancing Access to Secondary Education in India. As part of the project, they studied the National Education Policy 2020 and suggested recommendations within the existing framework in their presentation.
The policy has to be adaptive. It has to be changed based on the requirements of various regions, the students said.
“Every state has its educational requirements. For example, in a state where the literacy rate is lower, a big portion of the budget allocation has to be on enrolling children in school,” said Abhishek, a sixth-semester undergraduate student of economics.
In a state like Kerala, with high literacy, the focus of education has to be on sustainability and innovation, and the curriculum has to be designed to incorporate extensive digitisation and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) learning, he said.
Ashmita, a fifth-semester student of English, said: “We took into account natural factors, too, where the state has to allocate a budget for infrastructure considering the geographical vagaries. In Odisha or closer to home, in the Sunderbans, if a cyclone hits the place and destroys its schools, the government should rely on rebuilding schools through prefabricated material instead of brick and cement. This will reduce the time of construction, and students can go back to school faster.”
Abhishek and Ashmita submitted an 800-word presentation competing against more than 400 teams from across the country.
For the second round, they submitted a 3,000-word project.
The finals were held in IIM Calcutta on March 2. The Heritage students made a six-minute presentation for the finale.
“These are times of innovation and start-ups.... We have to expose our children and align them with the changes. If we help our youth to think differently, we will achieve the goal of being a knowledge economy. The students have to be backed by teachers and their institutions,” said Pradip Agarwal, CEO of the Heritage Group of Institutions.
Competitions such as this hackathon help students learn beyond the syllabus, said Debashis Mazumdar, the head of economics at The Heritage College.
“It is not only about studying economics or English but also making it interdisciplinary and connecting it with social sciences or history. Such projects widen the scope of learning,” said Mazumdar.